In the summer between my freshman and sophomore year of high school I was in a "relationship" with a kid in my grade, I'll just call him J for this post. I guess even from the start the relationship was just not how it was supposed to be. Before we got together, I had a date planned with this guy that I thought was nice. So during the months leading up to this, me and J had begun to get closer as friends. We texted all the time. When I first texted J about this date he started seeming a bit off. I knew that he had some mental illnesses, as do I, so at first I thought it was just an episode or something like I get sometimes. However, then he started to mention how I was the most important thing in his life, and that I was the only person keeping him alive. Now, we didn't know each other that well, but at that point he was still one of the closest friends I had. I'm not super sure why, but after that I had agreed to date him. I think I might have only seen him in person 3 times that summer, so the rest of this story developed over text. Almost immediately after we started dating, he started keeping me up later and later to talk to him about his mental health. This didn't really strike me as a problem, because I knew that he had depressive episodes often. However soon it got to the point where I had to stay up until 3 in the morning a couple times a week to stop him from taking a razor to his wrists. My days started to become full of more anxiety and depression from me, since I already have the two disorders, and then i was trying to prevent my "boyfriend" from cutting himself, and running on no sleep. He was still telling me that I was his only reason to live and I just started becoming scared and afraid of my phone buzzing and me getting another text. I had started trying to go to sleep earlier, since at that point I usually fell asleep at ten. He would get angry at me and argue that I always went to bed really late and that i still needed to stay up for him. Eventually I started coming up with whatever excuses I could to go to sleep so that he wouldn't force me to stay up. He would always try to guilt me into it and tell me he would do bad things to himself if I didn't. Two weeks before we broke up, I tried to break up with him. He began to tell me that if i said what he thought I was going to say he would kill himself. He kept talking about how he would harm himself if I broke up with him, so I wasn't able to do anything. That argument lasted for hours. At this point I had become ridiculously withdrawn from my family. Heck, we went to disney world that summer and most of the time all I could worry about was what he would say, not whether the line for space mountain was short enough. I didn't really go out at all, I just stayed in my room, and slept when I could. Two weeks after that argument, aka the first day of school, he forced me to break up with him. He kept telling me that he knew what I was going to say and that I needed to say it. He told me he was going to hurt himself either way and that I just had to break up with him. I was balled up on my bed, barely breathing as he kept threatening to kill himself if I broke up with him but making me continue all the same. I had one of our mutual friends swoop in to calm him down while I just sort of laid there having the longest panic attack of my life. The next day at school I immediately reported it to the guidance councilors that he was having issues and I was worried for his safety. The teacher i trust most kept trying to get me to talk about myself but I kept denying that I was having any sort of problem. Me and J's mutual friend turned on me after a day or so and began to tell me that I was the awful one in the relationship and that i was causing all of the harm. I blocked both of their numbers. J kept finding ways to contact me outside of texting. I ended up deleting a popular instagram account I had because he managed to contact me on there without even having an account. Another friend of his kept trying to get me to talk to him, telling me that he wouldn't eat again until I talked to him. At this point I was just so terrified that I shut down my phone for about four days so no one had a way to contact me, only turning it on again so I could receive notifications about school. During all of it I kept thinking that i would have to hurt myself, or that I would have to kill myself, because half of the people I knew turned against me and blamed me for how J was feeling and that I was some sort of awful person people only had nightmares about. He eventually stopped trying to contact me. Around two months later, for whatever reason, I tried to be friendly to him again, hoping that might help. Even talking to him ended a month later because he continued to blame me for everything that happened during the relationship. It's over a year later now and I don't think I've made direct contact with him since then, I try not to look at him when possible, and being near him and even in the same room puts me on edge or near to panic attack. I hate speaking or typing his name because it just makes things more real somehow and I don't know I'm just having a really hard time dealing with things. My friend has recently started to date him for whatever reason and I know that it's not my place to stop her but I've been seeing him more recently because of it and I'm having a really hard time having to hear and think about him being in a relationship. Honestly I don't even know if it's as big of a deal as I'm making it. Maybe I was the problem. I just have no idea and no one to talk to about it. Honestly I'm still having a hard time believing it could be classified as abuse. I'm trying to push past this and move forwards, but things like this kinda really suck. Hopefully I'll be able to come to terms with what happened fully and learn to forgive myself more and let a lot of these feelings go.